SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of December 2012

As 2012 rolled to a close, the SEO and content marketing world was inundated with predictions and prognostications of what is to come in 2013. This month’s content curation round-up is going to include a lot of crystal ball gazing. It’ll be interesting to come back here in a year’s time and see who was right, who was wrong, and who was so wrong we can point and laugh at them.

SEO and Content Marketing

During this session we’ve had some rather technical articles about SEO, so it’s time for a short breather. We’ll do this by taking a look at some of the tools that are useful for search engine optimization.

I can’t tell you how many links posts I’ve seen that are more boring than watching paint dry. More often than not they seem like they’re just a lazy blogger’s solution for getting a post out there quickly so they can take the day off. They put 10 or so links on a page and call it a day. But a links post can actually be quite valuable when done properly because they’re bookmarkable content.

The Mayan calendar ended this month. Contrary to the “predictions,” it wasn’t the end of the world, just the end of Mayan content. To avoid having your company come up short on content, let’s take a quick look at the history of web content and trends for 2013.

In this special feature of ‘Ask Entrepreneur,’ Facebook fan Cake Apps asks: What about buying high PR backlinks, will it hurt the SEO? How will Google know that I am paying? This is an easy question to answer: Don’t buy links.

It’s been an action packed year, and when you’re constantly pushing out content, time certainly flies by. The festive season is fast approaching and soon we’ll usher in the New Year. And with it brings the opportunity to continue the momentum of the past 12 months. A lot of people make New Year resolutions and it’s definitely the perfect time to start with a clean slate, implement changes to your content strategy and review the performance of your content.

Are you wondering if content marketing can help your business? If so, look no further. In this article, I examine a recent study involving 1,416 B2B marketers from North America from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. You’ll discover how B2B marketers were leveraging content marketing in 2012 and where their focus will be next year.

Blogging is great, but does local blogging also work? If you’re a small/local business owner, that’s a smart question to ask if you’re thinking about using a local blog as a marketing tool. Note: I’m using the term local blog to refer to a blog where the main focus is local content.

You have probably been told a million times that social media, web 2.0, and all those new networks are the current and future ways for companies to generate new business. You probably saw numbers such as these, making you ask yourself, why am I not yet doing it: Blogging companies get up to 55% more traffic.

I will remember 2012 as the year when SEO took a giant leap forward. It was the year when it became evident –among other things due to the diverse Google updates (Pandas and Penguins)– that if we looked to achieve consistent SEO growth over time we should definitely rely less time trying to trick search engines and short-term tactics that will be more difficult to scale and to focus more on doing #RCS.

Almost every single webmaster needs to think about how to optimize everything in order to get the perfect SEO results. The most basic methods are well-known and it certainly seems that most webmasters have already managed to understand them. However, things can always be improved and one method, internal linking, isn’t getting as much attention as it should when it comes to SEO optimization.

Social Media and Content Curation

Imagine if you discovered the formula for the perfect tweet—a message so perfect that Twitter users can’t help but follow your account and retweet your post. Well, hold on to your Twitter handles, because the perfect tweet has been discovered, in theory.

Nobody likes a cheater. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cheat just a little bit. The infographic below is a fairly simple high-level look at the top 9 social networks for your business, judging them by time investment, quality, and fun. It also includes some tips on how to use them to benefit your business.

Like it or not, the curators are coming. And I’m not talking about the kind that work with Art.sy. The latest wave of curation goes beyond Drudge Report-style link aggregation. It’s about adding some sort of value to the content you’re curating, either by the choices you make, the method of delivery, or what you do with it once it’s curated.

When it comes to content creation, there is still a lot of confusion when it comes to three major things that are happening in the content world: curation, republishing, and theft. Which ones are helpful to do? Which ones are harmful? And which ones do you even have control over?

Even award-winning marketers armed with seven-figure budgets can’t predict exactly how marketing will change in the future. The best any of us can do is to take calculated risks backed up with carefully crunched numbers. We also have to plan effectively but remain flexible to adapt to new trends, take cues from customers and respond appropriately.Here are six tactics that have become indispensable to the marketer’s toolkit.

There are over 500 million people registered on Twitter and growing. With about 750 tweets posted per second and 300,000 new visitors each day, it just shows how much Twitter has grown since it was first launched in 2006. On the business end, it is important to note that 79% of the Twitter users in the United States say they recommend brands they follow.

Producing sufficient quality content is the biggest challenge content marketers face according to recent research by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. While automated content curation offers a possible solution to this growing problem, it misses a critical point. To be done properly, content curation requires the added value that only humans can provide to convert curated information into quality content that supports your business objectives.

Social media influence is measured by the quality of your content. But what if you can’t always come up with content? If you are like many people, content creation may be one of your most difficult challenges.

Buzz used to be an intangible — something you just felt. No longer. “Buzz volume” is one of the metrics offered by a new generation of social-media-based tools that are transforming the way corporations gather intelligence about customers and competitors. “Consumer sentiment” is another: You can now get a reading on how customers are feeling about your brand.

And Finally…

It looks like the black-hat types out there have finally gotten the better of poor old Matt Cutts. Let’s hope a good rest over Christmas and New Year helps to get him back on track.

We’ll be back with you in 2013 with more of the best SEO, content marketing, and social media news, tips, and tricks. Happy New Year!